Chapter 15

After an enjoyable afternoon celebrating happy hour in Memphis, he went back to the hotel to take a nap and think about what might be next for him. Although he was enjoying the city very much and had gained a great deal of insight while he was there, he was enjoying the idea of both freedom and travel too much to stay in one place right now. He decided he would spend one more night in Memphis, and then continue on.

     He showered and changed into a jacket, and decided he would stay close to home tonight in the lobby bar at the Peabody. Although it was prone to tourists, he also loved the look and feel of the wooden décor and the old southern charm that it exuded. After a short hiatus, he had once again developed a fondness for the bourbons of the south, and decided he would sample several of them before saying his goodbyes to Memphis.

     He found a seat at the bar, ordered a Knob Creek neat, and settled in to watch the people and make his peace with Memphis. Adorned in his jacket and slacks, he almost felt like he could be a Memphis lawyer, relaxing after work and wanting to unwind a little bit. He was feeling less like an imposter and more like a chameleon these days, and marveled at how far away he felt from his identity as a psychologist, father, and husband he had been so comfortable with just a few short weeks before.

     After his second drink, he noticed an attractive looking woman had taken a seat at one of the tables, and John noticed she had looked over at him a number of times as she drank her wine. In another life he would have immediately walked over and spoken to her, but right now felt totally disconnected from any kind of sexual feelings. In his marriage, he had learned he had spent a lifetime pursuing sex in search of some kind of fleeting intimacy, but with his wife he had experienced it all.

     After another drink, the woman joined John at the bar, and for a moment he felt a tinge of both flattery as well as arousal. Would a life with another woman ever be possible for him? Right now he couldn’t even fathom it, but he left a little room in his badly damaged heart that one day he might feel different.

“I don’t mean to bother you,” the woman said. “But have I seen you on TV before? Like a documentary on comedians I believe?”

“Yes, you might have,” John replied. “Although I must admit I don’t recall ever being recognized before. Are you a comedian or something?”

“I’m a journalist, and my name is Amy. I’m writing a book on Memphis musicians and I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on the relationship between creativity and destructiveness. I must confess I even read your book on musicians and found it quite insightful.”

“Well I guess you know my name is John then,” he replied as he extended his hand. “I have to admit that I have been quite charmed by your little city here over the past couple of days. I would be very curious as to what you’ve found so far. Is there a specific angle you are taking with your project?”

“Well, it’s funny, I thought the book was going to be about one thing, but it turned into something completely different. I wanted to discuss the relationship between a career in music and the rising and falling pattern of their lives as their fame waxed and waned, but my research has taken me elsewhere. What I found, was that Elvis, Jerry Lee, Johnny Cash, all of them really. What they were actually looking for was for someone to really love them. I know that might sound Pollyanna, but the theme keeps showing up again and again. You’ve written extensively about dead celebrities John, has any of that been your experience?”

John thought long and hard about the question, an also about this woman who was now sitting beside him. He had written about the idea of synchronicity often in his work, and truly believed that people were often placed into your life for important reasons when you simply open yourself up to this possibility. Right now he felt very cautious and guarded, but also knew that his current approach to living would not produce a desirable result in the end. He took a long, deep, breath, and decided to take a leap of faith. 

Chapter 14

He woke up the next morning at the Peabody with a tremendous headache, and realized that all of this escapism also came with a price. He vowed to do something more active today, and decided he would visit both Sun Studios and Graceland for a little education about the legends of music that had come out of Memphis over the years.

     He got the idea for his field trip after flipping through the channels and seeing that the movie “Walk the Line” about the life of Johnny Cash was on. He found himself reflecting on one particular scene where Sam Phillips asks a young Johnny Cash, “If you had one song that would let God know how you felt about your time here on Earth, what would it be.” He thought about the question as it related to his own life. What was his defining contribution? He had written books and counseled thousands of people, but the thing in his life he had been the most proud of was truly having loved another person with all of his heart. Now that was gone.

     After his visit to Sun Studios, he headed over to Graceland, which was a place that had always been truly fascinating to him. The mystique of Elvis was such an interesting phenomenon from a psychological perspective, and since his first visit to Graceland as a kid, he had been intrigued by the whole experience.

     While he was on the tour, he couldn’t help but think about how Elvis had truly gained the whole world, only to lose his own soul. His eventual dependence on both uppers and downers to manage the ebbs and flows of his life was deeply saddening to John. Like John, Elvis had once found salvation in a wife and a daughter, but eventually lost it all. His eventual death in the bathroom from a drug overdose was as tragic as it was wasteful, and John reminded himself that he himself would also run out of time one day. Elvis was only a bit older than him when he died.

     The final stop on the tour was at the gravesite, where John observed a couple of older women silently weeping as they knelt over the tombstone. Elvis had left a remarkable legacy, and John watched the women closely, and wondered if anyone would ever weep for him when he was gone. He realized it was a selfish thought, but also knew that these kinds of feelings were actually quite natural in the face of death. Many of the tears at funerals were about this very thing.

     John took a quick tour of the Elvis museum to look at all of the cars and Elvis’ planes, and thought again about the false pursuit of materialism as a means to happiness. Many people spent a lifetime in pursuit of such things, and keeping up with the Joneses was an enduring part of American culture that John knew from his experience as a therapist was ultimately futile. Ultimately it is the depth and richness of our relationships that predicted happiness, as evidenced by Elvis’ sad and lonely demise despite all of his riches.

     He spent the rest of the afternoon drinking beer with the after work crowd in Memphis, and was again struck by how he was lost in America right now. He did his best to adjust to the southern accents and the conservative nature of the conversations, and found himself conversing with a number of people at the bar, which he took as a good sign. He was moving from a sense of total alienation and isolation to a feeling that he needed to slowly begin to rejoin the human race again. He found himself reflecting on the idea about human relationships as a predictor of happiness for the rest of the afternoon, and decided he wanted to take at least a few small steps in the direction of other people. 

Chapter 13

The next morning he left Kentucky, feeling like he had somehow internalized something that he was supposed to have experienced. He was feeling better now, but still knew he was a long way from being okay. What he had lost could not be replaced, and right now he was still trying to find reasons to keep on going. The road had been an interesting and even enlightening distraction, but sooner or later he knew was going to have to face his life again.

Looking at his map, he decided he would head towards the Grand Canyon for his next adventure. He had worked there as a kid just out of college, and during that time had one of the truly transcendent moments of his life at the bottom of the canyon in the dead of night. Emotionally and spiritually, he felt like he was again in the dead of night, and it couldn’t hurt to retrace his steps again.

He spent most of the day driving, and felt a kind of odd sadness as he crossed the Kentucky border into Arkansas. Something about the hills and the colors and the people he had met had been healing, and he once again felt on unfamiliar ground as he continued to venture to the west.

He decided he would stop in Memphis for a few days, as that town had also been a part of his somewhat checkered past before he had become a psychologist. He remembered his days there walking up and down Beale Street drinking beer and listening to music, and right now that seemed like a welcome distraction. He was regressing, he knew that, but the thought didn’t particularly bother him right at this time.

As he drove, he found himself remembering a quote from Richard Bach, and pulled over to the side of the road to find it on his phone. It read,

“Anyone desperate enough for suicide...should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.”
He though about this as it related to his own life, and reflected on how his current adventure may be related. He felt like he was bound by nothing, but that didn’t necessarily mean he wanted to stick around either.

A couple of hours later he was checking in to the world famous Peabody hotel, a place he normally would not have stayed at, but somewhere he was happy to spend the money on given his current situation. He arrived right as the Duck Walk was going on, a ritual in the hotel where Ducks marched in unison in and out of the hotel’s fountain that was situated in the lobby. Somehow the Ducks always knew right where to go. John chuckled to himself and hoped, somehow, that the same idea was true of him.

He looked out of his room on the 12th floor. The city had a genteel southern charm, and John felt himself getting excited about eating some of the BBQ and getting lost in some Blues music for the evening. Music had always been a source of great comfort for him, even in the days of his darkest and loneliest periods of depression. He was in one the best cities in the world to get lost inside of music, and he looked forward to revisiting a sad and fond memory from his past life.

He slept for a few hours before tackling the town, and had a dream about his farm that he hadn’t had since he had met his wife and started his new life with she and their daughter. It was a recurring dream from his childhood, where he was wandering alone on his grandparent’s farm, looking for someone to play with him. He had processed the dream as a patient in therapy, and had spent countless hours wondering what it might mean. He eventually concluded that the dream reflected a powerful desire to be close to others and to also feel a sense of safety while seeking this closeness.

Now he was the owner of the farm, and he had made his dream come true when he had married his wife Stephanie and adopted his daughter Kim. He had never had the dream again after he had found them, until now that is, and he woke up wondering if he was now back in the same psychological hole from which he started. Had he learned anything on his journey? Or was he destined to continue to struggle out of the dark and into the light for the rest of his days? He realized it was a morbid thought, but the dream had been far from comforting to him.